DEBATE – We could see it as a somewhat provocative intellectual joke, but the subject is much more serious than it seems: “bullshit” and its “constellations” will be in the spotlight of Pop Week Philosophy, from October 11 to 16 in Marseille.

“We will agree that bullshit is as hard to define as it is to avoid. That it destroys the conditions of social life. That it spoils our existence and that idiots are harmful people ”, asserts Jacques Serrano, creator of this quirky festival which gives pride of place to a philosophy of“ contemporary objects ”.

“The Semaine de la Pop Philosophie was created in 2009 in Marseille and was also presented in Brussels,” he explained on Friday October 1 at the Théâtre de La Criée, one of the places which will host the fifteen scheduled conferences.

“One of the objectives of this event is to treat serious things with lightness and stealthy things with depth, but also to try to help deconstruct what, within our society, promotes superstition and ignorance”, at -He pursues.

As such, bullshit appears to be a sufficiently serious subject for a psychologist and a psychiatrist, philosophers, academics, historians, journalists, essayists, a linguist and even an archaeologist to examine its “constellations” for a while. one week.

The inaugural conference on October 11 will welcome, among others, former minister Najat Vallaud-Belkacem for a reflection on the “Psychology of conversation in politics”.

The media will take it for their rank

The media will also take note of it during a meeting entitled “Mediaconry”, while art will not be outdone with a conference by Morgan Labar devoted to “The glory of stupidity: regression and superficiality in the arts. since the end of the 1980s ″, organized at the Frac.

As many speakers – about thirty for ten places – that there could be definitions of this concept of “bullshit” difficult to define and to which intellectuals have long preferred that of “stupidity”.

“In the word bullshit, what is expressed is not only a certain use of slang or a drift of the language, it is a transformation of social relations which leads to the multiplication of micro-conflicts” , analyzes the philosopher Maxime Rovère, author of “Que faire des cons? So as not to remain one yourself ”.

“We are constantly playing against each other very easily, and on a register of rejection which is immediately very intense”, he adds, warning against “the extreme contagiousness of these postures”: “When you identify someone as a jerk or a bitch, you yourself are becoming one, “he warns.